Karen Grigsby Bates
Karen Grigsby Bates is the Senior Correspondent for Code Switch, a podcast that reports on race and ethnicity. A veteran NPR reporter, Bates covered race for the network for several years before becoming a founding member of the Code Switch team. She is especially interested in stories about the hidden history of race in America—and in the intersection of race and culture. She oversees much of Code Switch's coverage of books by and about people of color, as well as issues of race in the publishing industry. Bates is the co-author of a best-selling etiquette book (Basic Black: Home Training for Modern Times) and two mystery novels; she is also a contributor to several anthologies of essays. She lives in Los Angeles and reports from NPR West.
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For more than a century the Chicago Defender has chronicled Black life in America. After Wednesday it will cease its print editions.
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The Chicago publishing giant that launched Ebony and Jet magazines, and made them a touchstone in African-American life, is closing its doors. It plans a court- supervised sale of its assets.
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Black students at San Francisco State College walked out in a protest that led to the rise of ethnic studies departments at colleges and universities around the country.
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A new book tells how the blinding of a black Army veteran after World War II by a South Carolina police chief helped lead to the desegregation of the U.S. Army.
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One of the protesters in a famous photo of a Mississippi lunch counter sit-in, John Hunter Gray, has died. Gray, a lifelong human rights activist, was 84.
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Rev. Jerome LeDoux served the St. Augustine Catholic Church community in New Orleans as it successfully fought off closure after Hurricane Katrina. He died Monday at 88.
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In these videos, it's black people calling the cops on white ones who are behaving in a socially irresponsible manner: They're not voting.
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Olympic sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos won gold and bronze at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. Their raised-fist salute outraged many viewers — and still resonates today.
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In the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, two Americans won medals for the 200-meter race. And then in a move that still echoes, they raised their fists in the black power salute on the podium.
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Historian Imani Perry looks beyond Hansberry's artistic genius to her involvement in several movements — civil rights, LGBTQ rights, anti-colonialism — ahead of the popular curve.